If there’s one piece of time-management advice I can’t stand (actually, there are hundreds, but never mind) it’s that cliche about how each of us has the same 24 hours in a day. “Don’t say you don’t have enough time – you have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa [and] Einstein,” goes one version, in a homespun work called Life’s Little Instruction Book.
I’ll grudgingly concede there’s a sense in which that’s true. But it’s a sense with no relevance to daily life. If you can afford a live-in chef, then you effectively have more time than someone who can’t. If you’re one of the few who can thrive on five hours’ sleep – as opposed to the many who attempt to – the same is true. This is galling for the rest of us. But it contains a kernel of good news for anyone who’s feeling overwhelmed. It shows that contrary to received wisdom, and maybe also the laws of physics, there really are ways to create more time.
The deeper point here is well expressed by an entrepreneur and programmer called Patrick McKenzie, whose work I found via lifehacker.com. We should think about time, he argues, in terms of assets and debts, like money. Some ways of using it create more later, just as you make money by stashing your savings in a high-interest account. (Note to younger readers: these used to exist.) By contrast, other ways will cost more time in future, the equivalent of credit-card debt.
McKenzie’s own field, computer programming, is full of “time assets”: you write code to perform some function, then never need write it again; you simply execute that code whenever the function is required. Creating a frequently asked questions page for your organisation is another example: invest time upfront, and you’ll be spared hours answering queries. Take a few minutes to fix the door that jams whenever you use it, and time saved may soon outweigh time spent.
The scary part, though, is how much of our lives we spend running up time debts. McKenzie defines these as “anything that you do which will commit you to doing unavoidable work in the future”. For programmers, that includes writing bad code: debugging later will take ages. It also includes email: almost every time you send or reply to a message, you’re implicitly committing to replying to the other person’s reply, too. So when you spend two minutes writing an email, although it feels like you’re eliminating two minutes’ worth of tasks, you’re actually adding more minutes to your workload. I’m not suggesting you stop responding to emails. But once you start thinking this way, you may find yourself apportioning time differently: investing a bit more, spending a bit less. I did.
But don’t take it from me. Gabriel García Márquez once explained how, when he started writing full-time, he felt guilty if he didn’t work all day. “I discovered that what I did in the afternoon had to be done over again the next morning,” he said. So he stopped at 2.30pm. His afternoon work created time debts the next day. It wasn’t merely less productive; it was anti-productive. You think you’re getting things done. But what if you’re undoing them instead?
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oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
